The relation between religion and science: a biological approach ...

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THE RELATION BETWEEN RELIGION

AND SCIENCE: A BIOLOGICAL

Preface

The attempt is made in this thesis to examine the age-long problem of the interrelationship of religion and science from a new angle, namely that of psychology considered as a biological science. There is a general recognition today that the elements common to the religions and those common to the sciences are psychological. The facts of religious experience and the facts of scientific experience are so multiform that the only place to discover a common basis is in the attitudes of consciousness giving rise to these variant concrete expressions. Furthermore there is a general recognition among psychologists that the genesis of all the attitudes, including the religious and the scientific, is localizable in the instinctive behaviors of the psycho-physical organism.

It seems only fair that psychologists should recognize that those best equipped to define instinctive behavior are the biologists. On the basis of a biologically acceptable definition, a sound theory of the origin of religion and science is possible. The theory proposed is that these attitudes have their roots in behavior which, while instinctive, is multiple. In proof of the contention, reference is made to many of the rites and practices of primitive peoples which are recorded in the source books on anthropology. It is the hope of the author that this effort may contribute in some small measure to the solution of a great problem.

A. S. Woodburne Camp Dodge, Iowa January, 1920

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Concerning Method i

II. A Historical Survey of the Influence of Psychological

Chapter I Concerning Method

It is the aim of this chapter to set forth in outline the development of a scientific method. The deductive method of Aristotle dominated the thinking of the Middle Ages and was ecclesiastically sanctioned in Catholicism. But the needs created by scientific progress made the evolution of a better method inevitable. The seventeenth century witnessed the rise of induction which in its developed form is the method of modern science. But induction, to be complete, must make use of the genetic method, involving history and psychology. Thus this sketch (i) indicates the cause and nature of the long conflict between science and theology, and (2) furnishes a vindication for the study of the relation of religion to science from the point of view of psychology.

The attainment of a method for a scientific approach to our human problems has a history which takes us back to the Greeks. The beginning of logic is to be found in Aristotle. It was his theory that reality is to be found in particulars, and that these particulars have universals and attributes attached to them. He was the first to conceive of reason (Aoyos) as a definite subject of investigation. The process of reasoning, he taught, was a combination of premises (<ruXXo7io>i6s) to produce a new conclusion. Logic was thus for him a science of deductive inference. He can hardly be said to have a logic of induction. His universals were obtained by a process of analysis and abstraction in which differences were eliminated and particulars were grouped according to their homogeneity into classes. Accordingly science, which was selective, picked on a specific object, which it handled with the tools forged for the purpose. Its abstract universals were obtained in the analytical fashion, and were then made the major premises in a deductive process which led to a definite conclusion. Any reasoning which could not be put thus in the form of a syllogism was regarded as imperfect.

Following upon the period of Greek scholarship came a long period when scientific learning made no progress. The achievements of the Greeks had been absorbed in the utilitarian spirit of the Roman Empire. Then followed that period of political and social corrosion known to history as the "Dark Ages," a period noteworthy for its lack of creative thought. It is to the Arabians that we owe the dawn of a new interest in both science and philosophy. These men, though Moslem, had come under the influence of Greek thought, and were the means for a revivification of Aristotelianism through the channel of a Semitic language. In Persia and in Spain, then under Saracen control, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries these men championed the mediaeval renaissance of science and philosophy. From the Arabians the renewed interest in Greek thought rapidly spread. The fact that the King of Sicily, Roger II (1093-1154), and the emperor, Frederick II (1 194-1250), called numbers of these Arabian scholars to their courts gave to the movement a new impetus. Translations of Aristotle were made, and the universities at Paris, Bologne, and Oxford began to study Aristotle with zest.

The spread of Greek thought meant that it soon found its way into Christian circles. The later scholastics were acquainted with and largely influenced by the new movement. At first the effect was an unsettling of the orthodox views of the time, and a type of mystical pantheism arose. This resulted in the University of Paris, with papal sanction, placing a ban on Aristotle (12 15), but in less than half a. century the ban was removed, and the Aristotelian system became the church's best tool chest. Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), Robert Groseteste (d. 1253), and John Rochelle (d. 1 271) were among the first ecclesiastics to make use of Aristotle. Albertus Magnus (1 193-1280) was "the first scholastic who reproduced the whole philosophy of Aristotle in systematic order with constant reference to the Arabian commentators, and who remodelled it to meet the requirements of ecclesiastical dogma." 1 But it is to Albert's great pupil, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1227-74), that we owe a thoroughly digested and ecclesiastical rendering of

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica (nth edition), XXIV, 353, article "Scholasticism," by A. S. Pringle-Pattison.

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the Aristotelian system. In his Summa Theologica Aquinas has made use of the conceptualist machinery of the Greek thinker. The form of the propositions with which he dealt is syllogistic. The content is intended to cover the range of human knowledge arranged according to the method of the subsumptive logic and subordinated to the church. It made use of all sources of ecclesiastical authority, Scripture, conciliar decisions, patristic comments and tradition, and thus built up a work which soon became the theological dicta of the Catholic church. So that the test of Catholic orthodoxy from that day until this is agreement with Aquinas.

The effect of this movement upon the church was to be seen in the attitude which it assumed throughout the Middle Ages. The effort was made to maintain an ecclesiastical standardization of all the departments of human life, science, and ethics, no less than religion and theology. The church claimed that she had received her knowledge by a supernatural revelation. The supernatural character of church knowledge thus placed it in a class independent of and superior to scientific knowledge, the source of which is fallible human reason. In case of a disagreement between ecclesiastical and scientific findings the course of conduct was logically plain. Remembering the source of church knowledge and that quality depends on origin, the inevitable rejection of scientific knowledge followed. Thus it was that the Catholic church maintained its authority ever science, and the bitter conflict between science and theology ensued. It ought to be evident that the conflict was virtually between two types of science. Theology, as we have seen, rested upon the whole framework of the Aristotelian deductive schema. But the physical sciences have never made any clear progress under the regime of deduction.

The heroic struggle of science for emancipation in the use of a method which would insure the most trustworthy results met with dogged and prolonged opposition. A beginning was made by Roger Bacon, who was a contemporary of the great Aquinas. But for two hundred years after Roger Bacon the church completely dominated the situation and no appreciable progress was made. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certain epoch-making events transpired which, on the one hand, compelled the church to take a less dictatorial attitude toward the sciences, and, on the other hand, made the evolution of a new method inevitable.

First there occurred the two great discoveries which gave rise to the great extension of navigation — the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492 and the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan, 15 19-21. The necessities of the expansion of navigation called for a new cosmology. The Ptolemaic hypothesis posited a flat and stationary earth at the center of the cosmos. Magellan proved that the earth was round by sailing around it. Copernicus (1473-1543) was the framer of the heliocentric cosmology which recognized the rotundity and motion of the earth.

The astronomical theory of Copernicus was opposed by Catholic and Protestant alike. The Protestant Reformation antedated the birth of induction, so that the Reformers were as bitter as the church in the invectives which they hurled at the new science, which conflicted with the scriptural cosmology to which the church had lent its imprimatur. Bruno, the Italian philospher and scientist, was burned as a martyr to the new science in 1600. But the telescope of Galileo, ten years later, proved the truth of that for which Bruno had been compelled to lay down his life.

The importance of Galileo was twofold. Not only did he establish beyond a peradventure the heliocentric cosmology, but he discovered that the motion of the earth was self-induced and self-sustained. This was a double attack on church doctrines. First, the church anthropology made man the center of creation, but even the earth which he inhabited was now seen to be eccentric. The dissolution of that doctrine was completed in the nineteenth century with the advent of Darwinianism. Secondly, the hypothesis of self-motion was a death-dealing blow to the doctrine of absolutes and apriority. Statics gave way to dynamics.

The work of Galileo was continued by Johann Kepler (1571- 1630), Issac Newton (1642-17 27), and Laplace (1 749-1847). Newton formulated the doctrine of gravitation by which the motions of the various planets are attributed to an inner pervading force, thus encountering opposition from the theological doctrine of a creating Providence. Laplace's nebular hypothesis afforded

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a causal explanation of the origin of the heavenly bodies which still further retired the theological explanation.

Every step of advance was made at the cost of a struggle. The older method was intrenched with all the fortifications of an organized and supermundanely authenticated system. But for all that, events proved that the source of the old knowledge was no guaranty of its truth. So the work of these astronomers along with the accomplishments of men in the other sciences, such as Leonardo da Vinci in the geological realm, made insistent the evolution of a method which should do justice to things as they are.

It remained for Francis Bacon to make the first formulation of the inductive method. Beginning with the hypothesis that the knowledge of nature depends on observation and experience, he proposed to observe and collect a vast number of facts, and then to follow the inductive method of getting universals from this mass of particulars. The aim was to acquire a command over nature by knowledge. He was therefore opposed to the syllogistic method which accepted its major premises from science on trust.

Descartes in his Discourse on Method attempted with mathematical precision to attain a basis for knowledge in the indubitable facts of experience. He carried into the field of the mental processes the method of natural explanation which the astronomers had introduced in the explanation of cosmic processes, in contradistinction to the supernaturalism of the Middle Ages. So that Francis Bacon and Descartes both insisted on the banishing of theology from science, thus freeing science to work out a new method as it substituted mechanical for final causation in the explanation of phenomena.

From the seventeenth century the inductive method has gradually become dominant m science, until today we may say that science is coterminous with induction. To be sure, the inductive method in our day has become something more scientific than it was in the days of Francis Bacon. Baconian induction was too atomistic and lacked a means of testing its conclusions. That has been remedied in the use of hypotheses and the trial-and-error plan for testing them. We are able to take the past up into the present in this way, and through the difference with the past we realize the present. The scientist finds an exception to a rule and sets about the formulation of a new rule that will include the exception. In this way the conclusions of science are attained experimentally and afford a legitimate means for the explanation and interpretation of human institutions, including religion. Science uses the research method, which includes the recognition of a problem and the finding of a solution thereto by the employment of hypotheses and tests.

With the evolution of a scientific method it was inevitable that sooner or later it should be employed in the study of religion. So long as religion was equated with revelation a science of religion or a historical study of religion was impossible. A beginning was made when David Hume in 1755 published his Natural History of Religion, giving it a historical and psychological basis. For more than a hundred years after that progress was slow. Here and there a scholar attempted to study religion more scientifically. But as a rule the method was the examination of a non-Christian religion and a comparison of it with Christianity with a view to showing the spuriousness of the former. It was a contrast between a human invention and a divine revelation.

It was not until the nineteenth century that the historical method really came to its own. That was consequent upon the rise of induction. A thoroughgoing observation of any human institution involves an investigation into the matter of how it came to be in the historical process, of the social substratum in which it was created, and of the order of sequence in its development. The first chair in the History of Religions to be established in a university was in the College de la France in 1884. Since then progress has been so rapid that the historical method has become synonymous with scholarship in the study of religion.

The historical method furnishes a survey of the way or ways in which any human product has functioned and has changed to meet the exigencies of social situations. It also furnishes data for the work of classification and appraisal. By the use of historical analyses one is compelled to understand the social and functional worth of all human creations. The older method tried to give an

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account of the truth of an idea by a syllogistic process; the new method leads to a study of the worth of an idea in the historical process. That means an appreciation of the relativity of all thought-products and the necessity of working with a true organon. And the organon to which the historical study of either religion or science leads is not conformity to an authoritative standard, but competency to do something for man which he needs to have done in his struggle for existence.

Notwithstanding the Catholic theory of an unalterable system of religious truth, the actual history of beliefs shows constant experimentation and mutation, an unconscious recognition of the scientific method. Contingency has played comparatively little part in the development of scientific thought as it has in religious thought. Actual problems demanding solution, concrete needs demanding satisfaction, social tensions demanding adjustment — these have been the historical progenitors of scientific laws and discoveries as well as of religious doctrines.

The historical method is the effort to be honest. It is the recognition that every development in history is determined by sociological and psychological influences. The deductive method is essentially normative. It works well so long as the major premise is scientifically credible. But when the universal scorns to account for the exceptions the method breaks down. The historian is just as much interested in exceptions as in rules. He seeks to know the facts and to adjust his theory to the facts rather than the facts to his theory. So that the historical method is the only method for objectivity. It recognizes that the life-processes cannot be confined within the bounds of the syllogism. Hence it takes cognizance of things as they occur, regardless of their place in logical processes. Scholasticism worked on the assumption that the criterion for religion must be logical, which in the last analysis is an attempt to locate the seat of religion in the intellect. But the historical and psychological study of religion shows that its locus is rather in deep-seated, felt needs of life which find their roots in the instincts.

The historical study involves the application of the genetic method. An interest in the functional value of an institution leads to the functional problem of how it came to be as the product of an evolutionary process. So that the natural complement of a historical study leads into the field of social psychology. "The past is involved in the present in the case of human history as much as in that of geological evolution." 1 Social psychology is one of the best tools that modern thought has invented for the interpretation of human institutions. It helps to an understanding of the place of religion in the social current and of the functional relationship between the facts of religion and the larger social whole in which religion operates. Historical study proves that there is no period which has a monopoly of spiritual values sui generis. Social psychology shows that it is as fruitless to seek to understand any religious reaction by itself as to visit a fossil museum without an understanding of geology. History gives us the records; social psychology helps us to relate religion to the stream of thought and life.

So then the deeper problems of life urge us on from a historical to a psychological study. History may be able to supply us with the order of sequence of religious happenings, but even here there are lacunae to fill in which the historian is dependent on the psychologist. In addition there are the further problems of (i) the determinants of the sequence of religious occurrences, and (2) the cause of the genesis of the religious phenomena themselves, and these are functional problems which it is not the province of history to solve. History is concerned with the external forms and products of religion and science. The study of the mental processes, individual and social, which gave birth to those externals is a psychological study. Consequently the last quarter of a century has witnessed the application of a psychological method to a study of these human institutions, particularly of religion.

The immense advance in the study of psychological science itself is fortunately coincident with its being used as a method for studying religion and other disciplines. Of especial import for the religious problem is social psychology, through which we are learning that the individual comes to mental and moral consciousness only

*F. A. Tennant, "Historical Fact in Relation to the Philosophy of Religion," in Hibbert Journal, VIII, 177.

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in a social world. The rise of religion is in the corporate life of the group. And, as Durkheim has shown, 1 the religion of a folk is a socializing of the supermundane world on the analogy of its own social structure.

The data for the historian and the psychologist alike are what people do. But behavior is socially determined both as to origin and to direction. So that history and psychology both lead to a social investigation. It is in the life-experiences of folks, considered historically and spiritually, externally and internally, that we seek to locate the genesis and value of both religion and science. Religion and science are both of them social facts inasmuch as they originated in the folk experiences to meet human needs.

It is only by the use of psychology that we can hope to make any adequate analysis of the phenomena of religion and science as human institutions. Historical observation furnishes us merely with the external phenomena. Cults and ceremonials, rites and rituals in religion, and laws, theories, and laboratory materials in science are not the stuff which afford us the differentia and the common elements for definitive purposes. The hopelessness of getting definitions on the basis of mere externals has been substantiated by their very numbers. The basis is a psychological one, 2 and it is to be found in the study of the history of human endeavors in their actual situations. The unifying principle which underlies the multiplicity of religious phenomena, the synthesis by which we abstract meaning from the facts of religious development, must be psychological. In precisely the same way the unity behind the multiplicity of scientific phenomena is psychological. So that we are driven into the use of a historico-psychological method for an appreciation at once of the differentia and the genesis of religion and of science.

2 Cf . Galloway, The Philosophy of Religion, section B of the Introduction, where the author discusses the problem of method. He points out very lucidly that an understanding of religion is only possible through psychology, because its expressions are those of a conscious mind which it is the province of psychology to interrogate. If, as Galloway points out, "the unifying principle which underlies the religious phenomena is the psychical nature of man" (p. 31), so too we may contend that the unifying principle beneath the multiform activities and creations of science has its seat in man's psychical nature. To that problem chapter ii is addressed.

Chapter II

A HISTORICAL SURVEY OF THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHO- LOGICAL THEORY ON THE PROBLEM

In an examination of the problem of the relation between science and religion, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the psychological bearing of the problem. A survey of the history of the relationships which have existed between these two disciplines reveals the fact that the prevalent psychological theory and method which were dominant in each period were two of the most important factors in determining the viewpoint of the scholars of that period toward this specific problem. Before passing to a consideration of the approach to the problem which is obtained through contemporary psychology it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate the bearing of the theories of the past upon our problem.

An investigation into the behavior of primitive peoples discloses the fact that there was no such thing as a science, mental or physical. There was no such thing as religion in the differentiated sense that we use the word today. There was no such thing as magic, as sophisticated people use the term. What we see is a vast complex, a heterogeneous mass of all the stuff out of which life is made. In other words, it is an undifferentiated complex of materials. One of the difficulties against which we need to guard is the danger of reading back into the activities of primitive man the differentiations which mark an age of culture.

The behavior of primitive man approximates to that of his animal ancestors in that it is more instinctive than reflective. His nervous system is as yet not developed to the degree that he has attained control over his motor activity, but that motor activity is simple and is spontaneously discharged in response to the stimuli which irritate his sensory organs. The attainment of control over those motor reactions is a part of the process through

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which there emerges intelligence and the power of reflection. The differentiation between the neurosis and the psychosis was evolved in this primitive stage of the life-process.

In this early period of the history of the race man did not make the difference which he came to make later between himself and the lower animals. The dominant needs of life which he experienced, nutrition and reproduction, were characteristic of the animals of the other genera. They were possessed of qualities, such as celerity in the deer, strength in the tiger, or cleverness in the fox, which he deemed to be decided advantages in the struggles of life. In that primitive stage when his brothers were often a prey to other animals, there was no overmastering evidence that he was getting the best of it. He belonged to a subaltern genus (man) in the summum genus (animal). It was, in brief, a predualistic age.

In this primitive period there were certain phenomena, such as dreams, sleep, death, the visibility of the breath on a cold day, which played an important role in the evolution of man's reflective processes. One of the first evidences which we have of a dualism resultant therefrom was the difference which he made between the seen and the unseen. The phenomena mentioned helped him to the conclusion that there must be an unseen world which he imaginatively peopled with life such as existed in the seen world, with the exception that the life there was disembodied, which gave to it an undue advantage over him. These animistic conceptions were at first very vague, as were indeed all of his primitive reflections. They were the reflections which belonged to a prescientific and therefore pre-psychological age. In the seeking for the satisfactions for his primitive wants, about all the distinction which he made was a distinction between things or powers which helped and things or powers which hindered him in the procuring of those satisfactions. The unforeseen phenomena of life would call forth instinctive reactions. The stubbing of his toe on a protruding stone or root would cause him to react to the stone as though it were animated, and he would never quite recover from that attitude growing out of his first reaction. In that way the objective world would very gradually become for him animated with helpful and harmful spirits. His own desire to help his friends or to hinder his enemies in the struggle to procure the satisfaction of their wants contributed to the association of his helps and hindrances which were to him inscrutable with some other animus. Here we have another factor which played its part in the development of animism. It would be assuming too great sophistication, however, to say that here we have primitive man's scientific category of causality. It was simply his distinctions between helps and hindrances toward the satisfaction of pressing needs, the helps being gradually associated with a friendly animus and the hindrances with a hostile animus. Neither can we say that this belief in animi was due to the fact that man was "incurably religious," to use the phrase of Sabatier, 1 but it was rather the beginnings of the reflective process trying to solve the problems of life with its demands for means to meet its recurring needs.

The age of primitivity, then, is not to be studied with the object of procuring data to substantiate a preconceived theory which we desire to have confirmed. If we approach the facts as they are presented in experience in the history of the race, we do not find primitive man making those differentiations which we sometimes assume are as old as the race, the distinctions between the physical and the psychical, between the human and the lower animal, between religion and science and art. We are able, indeed, to find a great deal of the material out of which these differentiations developed, but the process of making those distinctions belongs to a subsequent age, and the fact that man did learn to apprehend the differences noted proves that he has transcended the age of primitivity.

II

In Greek thought we meet with the development of a thoroughgoing dualism. And the great names with which this development is associated are, of course, Plato and Aristotle. Plato arrived at his dualistic hypothesis through a consideration of the cognitive problem. He set out with the conviction that knowledge is attainable only through deduction, and set for himself the problem

1 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 3.

of discovering why knowledge comes through conception. He concluded that the value- judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness do not arise from experience. So he was forced to posit a supersensible world as the source of those value- judgments. In that way he had the supersensible world as the intelligible world, the real world, the world of ideas. Over against it was the world of experience, the sensible world, or the phenomenal world. The latter he conceived to be a copy of the former; the latter was the particular and the former the universal. Plato gave metaphysical value to the world of ideas and had an aversion to the natural order. His process was the very opposite of ours. He knew the supersensible world through knowledge (eiri(TTi]yn) and the sensible world through faith {iriains), thus reversing our order of faith and certainty. Plato was certain of God, and he accepted the phenomenal world by faith. We are sure of the world, and we know God by faith. For him the Idea was being; matter was non-being (to bv and m 6v). In this way Plato arrived at dualism as an epistemological device.

Aristotle attempted to overcome the difficulty inherent in the dualism of Plato. He accepted the point of view of his predecessor that the beginning must be made from conceptual knowledge. The knowledge of real being, he agreed, is the knowledge of universals. But he saw that Plato's theory of Ideas was inadequate to explain the world of experience. So he tried to identify the two worlds of Platonic thought by saying that real being is in the particular, in which the universal is also present. To discover the relationship of the universal to the particular he founded the science of logic. Aristotle asked the question, What are the generative causes of real being? His answer was that there are four causes, viz., material causes (OX77), formal causes (eI5o$), efficient causes or moving causes (clpxv), and final causes (reXos). As the reflection went on there came to be a practical identification of the formal, efficient, and final causes in one constituent general principle. This meant a reduction of generative causes to two, Idea or form (ettos) and matter (tfXr?) . The former is the essential or cause proper, while the latter is the secondary cause. Aristotle formed a conceptual pyramid with his one eternal, actual Being, the uncaused Cause, unmoved Mover, pure Form without matter, at the apex of the pyramid.